Tag Archives: Giant serpent

As the open session for bidding on e-bay for the A5 size card paintings and drawings submitted to the St Gemma’s Secret Art Project has now closed, I am free to say which two pictures were submitted by me. Of course, they are not single continuous lines.

The first one, above, is called “Loch Knares Monster”. I used coloured pencils to produce delicate shades in the water and sky in contrast to the acrylic pen outline on the Serpent.

I have always been interested in the Loch Ness Monster, so what is wrong with turning the famous railway bridge in Knaresborough into a giant serpent. My first attempt at the monster, years ago, was to add one to a mural of Venice which had been painted all over the bathroom wall of a house I shared with several others in Leeds in the late 1960’s.

Also an artist friend of mine, Bryn Glover, constructed a sculpture of “Nessie” from a motor cycle chain in 1969. He worked at Leeds General Infirmary and once used a huge pair of forceps in a sculpture of a pelican.

There had to be a train in it, particularly a steam train, but I did not feel that my favourite engine “Mallard” would be appropriate. See photograph below of Mallard crossing the Knaresborough bridge.

One day in the mid 1950’s, when I was on holiday staying with relatives, my cousin John Simmister and myself wandered into the railway sidings in Peterborough. We saw Mallard, all be itself and so dirty that you could hardly tell that it was green. We climbed into the cab and talked about what it would be like to travel at 126 miles an hour and break the world steam record.

“Mange 2 – Rail Root North” was coloured in acrylic and in a style which I hoped would be very different to my Knaresborough picture.

The HS2 railway project from London to Leeds and Manchester has been dragging on for years and I thought that I would compare that train to a streamlined pea pod. My wife Joan comes from Wakefield, which is Rhubarb Triangle country, and as she is a vegetarian I thought she may appreciate the “jokes”.

Here is a clipping from this month’s Yorkshire Reporter, showing that HS2 is still big news.

Yorkshire Reporter, November 2018, showing plans for Leeds Railway Station as part of the HS2 project.

Therasa May is one of the celebrities (including John Bishop and Kaiser Chiefs) who have agreed to submit a picture to the Secret Art Project, but there is probably no danger that people will think that she painted Mange 2.